Legal News

The Verdict: Hits and Whiffs From the Week That Was

By Dan Slater

Here at the Law Blog we wish everyone could skate into the two-day break feeling like a winner. But, alas, some legal eagles will soar, and some will fall. In the first of what we hope to make a weekly item, here’s an LB round-up of this week’s victories and defeats.

First, the “Hits”:

A Patent Party: See any patent partners chugging beers in the hallway on Wednesday? Because of a ruling in Tafas v. Dudas, they’re now free to file long, complicated patent applications. A court shot down a PTO rule that attempted to streamline applications by limiting the number of claims to 25. Patent associates, for whom this might mean more late nights at the office, can thank the winning attorneys in the case, K&E’s Daniel Sean Trainor and Elizabeth Locke; and Kelley Drye’s William Golden, Steven Moore and James Nealon.

Happy Birthday Mr. Paparazzi: The families of photographers who documented the iconic image of Marilyn Monroe scored a big win when an L.A. district judge ruled that Monroe was a New Yorker, not a Californian, when she died, meaning her estate holds no right of publicity. The lawyer for the photographers’ families, Surjit Soni, said that if the estate can no longer extract a licensing fee, “you will see a great deal more Marilyn-related products, and they will be lower in price.”

A Big Man Admits His Mistake: Marvin Arrington, a Georgia judge, felt so bad about kicking white lawyers out of his courtroom so he could lecture a group of primarily black defendants, that he went on CNN Tuesday night to explain and apologize. “I didn’t want them to think I was talking down to them; trying to embarrass them or insult them . . . .” said Arrington.

And now, the “Whiffs”:

That’s Not Funny: From the “Keep It To Yourself Next Time Department,” David Lamos, while representing death row inmate J.B. “Pig” Parker, faxed a fake motion to the prosecutor in 1999. The purported motion, which Lamos called a “jest” when he testified last month in Parker’s post-conviction case, was written in “ebonics,” according to experts, and is now being used against Lamos to argue that his representation of Lamos was ineffective. “If you look at the content of it,” Lamos told the Law Blog, “it is ridiculously funny.”

Ouch! Dean Makau Mutua and his Buffalo law school took a serious blow in the recently-released U.S. News & World Report rankings, dropping from 77 to 100. Dean Mutua provided the Law Blog with a spirited critique of the rankings (and a defense of his school), but, he conceded, no one is “denying the impact” of the school’s fall-off in the rankings. “Parents and prospective students look at them as one of the measures of desirability for a law school,” Dean Mutua said. “That’s just the nature of the place these rankings play in the marketplace.”

50 Million? That’s how many unhappy “light” cigarette smokers there were yesterday. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals decertified a class in a lawsuit alleging that tobacco makers deceived them into believing that light cigarettes were healthier than regular, full-flavored smokes. The plaintiffs’ damages request of $800 billion was based largely on economic grounds: that the deception caused the plaintiffs to buy cigarettes that weren’t worth their price. The defeated lawyer: Michael Hausfeld, of the firm Cohen Milstein.

LB’ers: That’s how our scorecard shakes out for the week — now’s your turn to weigh in. Please call out some cases, and their counsel. (Keep it civil, folks!) And have a good weekend!

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on December 31, 1969 (boomark / email).